Decades after a deadly border crossing, this survivor speaks out about what she endured

SAM DINGMANL Back in 1980, Dora Rodriguez was one of 30 migrants who crossed the border into the United States, seeking refuge from the increasingly oppressive regime in El Salvador.

The group entered Arizona from the southwest and made it as far as Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument before they ran out of water and were abandoned by the guides they had paid to usher them to safety. Lost in the desert, the group endured days of starvation and violence before they were found. Only 13 of them survived — including Dora.

The image of Dora’s near-lifeless body being carried out of the desert appeared on the front page of newspapers and sparked a movement to offer sanctuary to refugees from Latin America. Dora herself went on to raise a family and founded a nonprofit called Salvavision, which connects migrants and deportees with various forms of aid.

But for decades, Dora kept the story of her border crossing to herself. Then, in 2016, dismayed by language from politicians that characterized migrants as criminals, she decided it was time to tell her story. And now she’s published a memoir called “Dora: A Daughter of Unforgiving Terrain.” She’ll be speaking at Changing Hands [Thursday] evening.

When I read Dora’s book, I was struck by a scene early in the story, when Dora was still a teenager living in El Salvador. She wrote about a song she used to listen to, called "Las Casas de Carton." When we spoke, I began our conversation by asking her about it.

DORA RODRIGUEZ: That particular song brought to us, like the sentiment of a fight. And it was also used a lot on protest when the university of my town, which was Santa Ana, were out there in the streets protesting the disappearance of students. And they would use the song with big speakers, loud speakers. For me personally, it had a big impact.

DINGMAN: Dora, do you remember how the song went? Would you be able to hum a few bars of it for us?

RODRIGUEZ: In Spanish?

DINGMAN: Sure. Yeah.

RODRIGUEZ: (SINGING) Que triste vive la gente en las casas da cartón.

I am not a good singer.

DINGMAN: No, that was wonderful. That’s wonderful. Thank you.

RODRIGUEZ: But it says, it is so sad to see my people in the houses of car boxes.

DINGMAN: Meaning like sent away on trains?

RODRIGUEZ: Yes.

DINGMAN: So then, as you write in the book, there comes a time when your mom warns you that you have to destroy this record that you used to listen to, this record that had a recording of the song.

RODRIGUEZ: Yes. It was a particular afternoon that we were listening after school, and my mother came running and said, “You guys need to destroy this because they’re searching through homes.”

And they were. That was a very common practice to just kick the door open — for people from the government — and go in your house without any warning and just check everything you had in your house.

So my brother and I, we were together listening to the song, and I grabbed it from his hand. And we had toilets. And we just destroyed it in pieces and threw them in there. And within minutes, the soldiers started knocking on our door. And I am sure my brother and I were still shaking, but we were composed, and we said, “Come on in and check. We don’t have nothing to hide.”

DINGMAN: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that, Dora. I mean, that scene for me was such a palpable illustration of the level of paranoia that you had to live with.

RODRIGUEZ: Yes, we did. As young people, every day, every weekend we would go to outside towns, walking, just hiking. But you could no longer do those kind of things because things were drastically changing in our community. And all you saw was trucks full of soldiers pointing guns, rifles. And it’s very scary.

DINGMAN: So at a certain point, as you write about, you in conversation with your mom decide that it would be better for you to try to get to the United States. And one of the things that you talk about is that you and your family had realized not just that it would be better for you to be in the United States, but that it would be safer for your family for you to be in the United States.

RODRIGUEZ: Yes, because I was the oldest one. ... And from my three siblings, I was the more spoken and vocal and involved in community activities. So my mother was afraid that because they were going to come after me or they were to look for me because my association with the Maryknoll Sisters.

DINGMAN: Yeah. And tell us, the Maryknoll Sisters were a charitable organization that you were working with, right?

RODRIGUEZ: Yeah. The Maryknoll Sisters were American nuns. They were placed in very marginalized communities in our country at that time to organize — not against the government — but to organize to make our communities better. Like for us, we were trying to get a park going. We finished the part because of their support.

DINGMAN: This is something you talk about very compellingly in the book, is this sense that even if the work that you were doing on behalf of people in the community had nothing to do with politics — even if it was just, as you said, trying to make life a little bit better — the government at the time was so paranoid that that might indicate that you had sympathies with revolutionaries that they were killing people in the streets.

RODRIGUEZ: Yes.

DINGMAN: So as a result of all this, as we were alluding to a moment ago, you do decide to leave and try to make it to the United States. It took three attempts to get here, and much of the book is focused on that third attempt. Which, though it was ultimately successful, is an unbelievably difficult story to read. And you’re so honest about the horrors that you survived trying to make it through the desert with the other people who you were with.

RODRIGUEZ: Yeah. When you go through a tragedy like that, I believe in your life, it’s just you have it for the rest of your life. But I was able to place it in a compartment in my heart, in my brain, in my soul, that it wouldn’t attack me every day to survive. But I always had that in my mind that someday, before I got too old, I wanted to put this in a book.

It has not been easy. It’s been hard. In the process of writing, I would wake up at midnight just crying and scared and thinking, “Well, it was there. It never went away.”

DINGMAN: Well, and just to give listeners a sense of what we’re talking about here — and a warning this is very difficult to hear. But you’re writing about it because it’s important.

You talk about reaching the point where you and your fellow travelers had to drink your own urine to survive because there was so little water. You talk about some people being so exhausted from the heat and feeling so lost and hopeless that you would never make it to your destination, that they started asking each other just to let them die there in the desert. You write about one of the people you were traveling with starting to sexually assault the other women on the trip.

It’s just awful. But I got the sense from the way that you wrote about it in such a clear-eyed way that it was important to you for people to realize.

RODRIGUEZ: Yes. And, I opened my story to the world because I felt morally obligated to humanize who we are and why people leave their countries. I want people to know that behind each family, behind each person that is criminalized and arrested and put in detention and separated, it is a family. It is a whole family, a whole community that suffers.